Making Sense Through Our Senses:
The Embodied Reader in Arthur Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else and Paul Czinner’s Filmic Adaptation
Tatjana Zimbelius-Klem
Honors Thesis
Department of English and Comparative Literature Comparative Literature Program
University of North Carolina-Chapel Hill 2016
Approved:
Inger S. Brodey
Jonathan M. Hess
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
INTRODUCTION
Western culture has a long tradition of trying to separate the mind and the body and prioritizing the knowledge that we derive through intellectual reasoning. Plato first laid out what we now call his “Theory of Forms” in the Socratic dialogue Phaedo, reducing all physical objects to copies of ideal forms which exist in an immaterial realm of their own, accessible only through rigorous mental work. These forms are universals, thus making the world both possible and intelligible. But not only idealists like Plato deny the body any epistemological capacity: dominant discourses in the Western tradition have largely neglected the body as such as a vehicle of knowledge, at least until pre-Romanticism. When it comes to aesthetics, we can see a similar hierarchy playing out in terms of the senses. Whereas Plato was highly skeptical of the body as a locus of
In a variety of fields, fin-de-siècle Viennese thought moved beyond pure reason as a vehicle of reliable knowledge, adding new value to formerly neglected realms of the human experience, namely the human psyche and sensory experience. Alois Riegl, the pioneering Viennese art historian of the late nineteenth century who was instrumental in establishing art history as an independent academic discipline, examined which of our senses have been primarily engaged in the visual arts over time. He traced the
development of art history from art that emphasizes the physical tactility by occupying a single plane, encouraging interaction and an attention to texture, like Egyptian art, to figurative, perspectival art that allows for the illusion of space and three-dimensionality, thus encouraging an optical visuality as opposed to the haptic visuality of
pre-Renaissance art. Through the illusion of space on a two-dimensional plane, perspective emphasized the distance between the observer and the artwork, thus prioritizing a visuality that distances itself from the observed object as the viewing subject situates itself at a remove.
The late nineteenth and early twentieth century was a period in which interiority and the human experience were thoroughly examined in many artistic and academic fields: the young discipline of psychoanalysis dug into depths of the human mind that had not been explored before; in physics and philosophy the positivism of the so-called Wiener Kreis around Ernst Mach put a new emphasis on the importance of sensory experience as the primary source of knowledge.1 Part of the intellectual elite of fin-de-siècle Vienna, Arthur Schnitzler (1862–1931) was familiar with all these new
developments and personally acquainted with many of their proponents. He was a physician like his father, and like Sigmund Freud he was greatly interested in the workings of the human mind. Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else (1924) is a novella about a young woman who is asked by her parents to beg an older man for money in order to pay for the father’s debts. It is written in the form of an interior monologue which abandons an independent observer who orders and evaluates events and instead assumes the
perspective of the narrating self. The novella’s subject is the disintegration of cultural and social certainties and how this disintegration necessarily leads to a dissolution of the personal construct.
I will pay close attention to how the haptic and the visual merge to allow for both clear vision and a visceral Schwindelgefühl that adds a layer of sensuous cognition. The term “haptic” is derived from the Greek word ἅπτω (hápto) and its many meanings range from “I kindle, set on fire, fasten fire to” to “I fasten to, bind fast, join to” or “I cling to, hang on by, lay hold“ (1 Cor 7, “don’t hold on to a woman” is a prohibition of sexual intercourse, for instance). The Oxford English Dictionary defines haptic not only as “of the nature of, involving, or relating to the sense of touch, the perception of position and motion (proprioception), and other tactile and kinaesthetic sensations,” but also as
“having a greater dependence on sensations of touch and kinaesthetic experiences than on sight, esp. as a means of psychological orientation.”2
It is the aspect of the haptic as a mediator between the distance senses of vision and hearing and the proximal sense of touch and visceral response that I will be most
interested in, especially the relationship between the kinesthetic experience and
(psychological) orientation, being moved by sensation both literally and figuratively.3 As I will lay out, a sense of Schwindelgefühl is at the heart of the protagonist’s experience. The German term does not have an exact correspondence in English, but it refers to a sense of vertigo or dizziness—when our senses betray us and trick us into experiencing movement when there is none. Schwindel, as it happens, not only refers to this feeling of instability when the world seems off kilter, but it also means “swindle” or “fraud.” As we will see, in Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else it is the father’s act of swindling others that sets the events in motion and propels the story forward, throwing Else into a maelstrom of the conflicting forces of filial piety and a strong desire to defend herself and her individual freedom. In Fräulein Else Arthur Schnitzler puts under the microscope of his
psychoanalytical gaze a society that is pathologically preoccupied with the surface, keeping up appearances at all costs, concealing that which is not golden, pretending it does not exist. As a physician who was interested in hypnosis as a tool to diagnose and treat psychological disorders, Schnitzler—who wrote a Traumtagebuch himself—was familiar with the latest insights and theories of the “Father of Psychoanalysis,” Sigmund Freud. Eros and thanatos, the two major drives of human existence, are also the drivers of the novella, and the theme of the oedipal is clearly at play in the text.
3 British neurologist Henry Charlton Bastian (1837-1915) coined the term in 1880, deriving it from Greek kinein “to move” + aisthesis “sensation”:
“We may […] speak of a Sense of Movement, as a separate endowment. Or in one word, Kinæsthesis […] To speak of a ‘Kinæsthetic Centre’ will certainly be found more
convenient than to speak of a ‘Sense of Movement Centre’.”
The Austro-Hungarian director Paul Czinner (1890–1972) adapted the text for his 1929 silent film Fräulein Else with his wife Elisabeth Bergner in the title role. He
skillfully used cinematic tools to transform the written narrative into a cinematic text that is original yet retains both the central effect of Schwindelgefühl to illustrate the subject of the text, namely the disintegration of social, cultural, and thus personal certainties, and the haptic visuality and aurality of its predecessor. These factors make an embodied reader response approach that focuses on the engagement of the senses equally suitable.
Blending reader-response with phenomenology and embodied cognition, I will look at the ways in which the reader’s embodied self fills in said gaps by engaging with the many sensual opportunities offered throughout a text to create meaning. The body was long considered peripheral to understanding the nature of mind and cognition in philosophy of the mind and cognitive science, but phenomenologists like Edmund Husserl or Maurice Merleau-Ponty pulled the body back into the realm of
epistemological faculty, insisting that an understanding of the body underpins the possibility of lived experience. Francisco Varela has taken up their ideas, arguing that “cognition depends upon the kinds of experience that come from having a body with various sensorimotor capacities, and […] that these individual sensorimotor capacities are themselves embedded in a more encompassing biological, psychological and cultural context” (172). Embodied cognitive science uses the following Embodiment Thesis as a working hypothesis: “Many features of cognition are embodied in that they are deeply dependent upon characteristics of the physical body of an agent, such that the agent’s beyond-the-brain body plays a significant causal role, or a physically constitutive role, in that agent’s cognitive processing” (Wilson).
skin to feel the cool dampness on our skin, to smell the thick air of a November morning, and to see in our mind’s eye the veil that covers the landscape. Laura Marks argues that with a reevaluation of the proximal senses a new level of knowledge can be obtained, because they “operate at the literal border between the intimate and the communal. Knowledge and communication that makes use of them may lose in ‘objectivity’ but they gain in depth, trust, and sociality” (Marks 2008/2011, 247).
Schnitzler’s novella Fräulein Else, published in 1924 and set in the early years of the 20th century, is especially suitable for an embodied reader-response approach due to the fact that it is written in the form of the interior monologue. The interior monologue is a literary technique that presents a narrative as the direct presentation of a character’s thoughts. These can range from loosely related impressions and associations to more structured, elaborate passages that allow the reader to make sense of the larger context and the supposed intent of the speaker. The outside world enters the story through the eyes and ears of the narrator, and it is the reader’s task to create the bigger picture—that which is outside of the narrator. Interior monologue or stream of consciousness, as it is also called, was perhaps not an invention of the late nineteenth or early twentieth century, but the spirit of the age certainly lent the technique a pressing timeliness.
would be imprisoned. Von Dorsday agrees to pay the fee under the condition that he see Else naked for fifteen minutes.
The whole premise of the plot’s climax—namely that Else should undress so that Herr von Dorsday could see her naked for a quarter hour and would then agree to pay the father’s debt—revolves around acts of seeing: Dorsday asks to see Else naked, but Else also sees the conditions of her existence clearly for the first time, realizing that there is no way out of this dilemma that would keep her integrity intact, as she has to choose
between loyalty to her father (who doesn’t deserve it) and to herself (who doesn’t have the agency).
Hearing, too, is an important part of the narrative. For one, it features a musical meta-narrative that mirrors the plotline as in a fun house mirror, turning the romantic musical exchange between lovers in Schumann’s Carnaval into a skewed cat-and-mouse-game between two very unequal partners. Secondly, the outside world enters the story through Else’s aural and sensuous perception which is indicated by punctuation and formatting. The way in which our visual and aural senses and sense memories are engaged has a haptic quality, touches and moves the reader by eliciting a certain kind of instability and dizziness which I will refer to as Schwindelgefühl.
down the distance between the viewing subject and the viewed object—which, in the case of the literary, self-narrating Else, is a cross of both of these positions. Laura Marks, a film scholar and theorist whose research focuses on intercultural perspectives on new media art and philosophical approaches to materiality and information culture, uses the term haptic visuality to examine how certain (video) images invite a sensory response rather than an intellectual one. Lack of focus, exaggerated exposure time or extreme close-up are techniques that blur images or make them hard to identify at first glance, and Marks argues that the way we make sense of them is by letting our sense memory do the investigative work. Intellectually, we may not be immediately able to identify what it is that we see, but our bodies know better. She takes the term from Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari who use it in reference to “smooth space, a space that must be moved through by constant reference to the immediate environment, as when navigating an expanse of snow or sand” (Marks 2002, xii). The “striated” space, on the other hand, is that which
corresponds to the more distant sense of vision. I will employ the term haptic visuality slightly differently, using it to refer to ways in which both the literary and the filmic text engage the reader’s sense of vision in order to move her viscerally, eliciting the
Schwindelgefühl that is at the core of Else’s experience.
The novella had been one of Arthur Schnitzler’s greatest successes throughout his entire career. It was first published in the notable German literary magazine Neue
kinematograph almost as often as the theater.4 Several of his works had already been adapted for the cinema, notably Anatol by Cecil B. DeMille in 1921 (The Affairs of Anatol), and Der junge Medardus in 1923, directed by the Austro-Hungarian Michael Kertész who would later go to Hollywood and make a name for himself as Michael Curtiz. Already in December of 1924 Arthur Schnitzler makes a note in his journal of having talked with the dramaturge and literary agent Franz Horch “über Frl. Else als Regieaufgabe” (quoted in Wolf, 85). The actress Elisabeth Bergner, one of the most-beloved young stage actresses in the German-speaking world at the time, was his ideal Else right from the start. Her delicate build and androgynous type matched the beauty ideal of the 1920s, and her intense acting elicited praise for her physical expressiveness, reviewers raving about her “Gliedersprache” (Herbert Ihering, Berliner Börsen-Courier, Nr. 114, 8 March 1929, quoted in Gandert, 183) and the “Melodie ihres Körperspiels” (ib.) of the “leuchtende Seelenschauspielerin” (Alfred Kerr, Berliner Tageblatt, Nr. 115, 8 March 1929, quoted in Gandert, 184). Film historian and critic Lotte Eisner describes Bergner as “[v]ibrant, sensitive, an actress of great nervous intellectuality […]. Up to the advent of Hitler, she embodied the spirit of an age which was ardent, anguished, intensely spiritual and still very close to the expansive ecstasy of the immediate post-war years” (Eisner, 197). One can see how Bergner and her ability to express mental states through her physicality would seem like a natural choice for young Else, particularly considering the adapted text and its form of the interior monologue. Czinner skillfully combined
4 For an extensive analysis of Arthur Schnitzler’s attitude towards cinema and his own creative engagements with it, see Claudia Wolf, Arthur Schnitzler und der Film.
Bergner’s strengths with an eloquent camera to tell a devastating tale of betrayal and exploitation. Through specific artistic choices, such as superimpositions, fast cuts, or specific camera movement depending on the character, he elicits the Schwindelgefühl in the viewer and makes us understand Else’s ordeal on a visceral level: not just showing and telling, but making us feel what it means to be in her position.
So why then is the engagement of the senses so vital for our making sense of this particular story, and what is it about the Schwindelgefühl that imparts superior knowledge to the reader/viewer? Several factors play a role. Else is a young woman of nineteen years, and while there are passages in the text that show her as a truly insightful, observant, and well-educated young woman, she is caught up in her own world and cannot step outside of herself to analyze the full extent of her circumstances. But there is also another factor that may play a part: the implications of the bargain she is asked for are unspeakable, being sold off by her own parents (in the case of the novella—in the film the mother bears all responsibility) to pay for the father’s failures. Words alone necessarily fail to relate the extent of the tragedy, hence the need for additional means to describe it. The reader/viewer needs to embody Else’s dilemma in order to empathize with her. If we as viewers remain distant from the title character, Else’s reaction to Dorsday’s indecent proposal might be seen as excessive, after all she only needs to show herself unclothed for fifteen minutes. Both authors, Schnitzler and Czinner, deal with this in rather different ways: Schnitzler’s Else is exhibitionist and a bit of a narcissist,
merely by the nature of the demand—as she obviously enjoys at least the idea of showing herself as long as she is the one who decides about the when, where, and to whom—, but by the implications: As a daughter, Else should feel safe and protected by her parents, not used as a pawn to buy out the fraudulent father. By asking Else, if indirectly, to prostitute herself, they are pulling the figurative rug out from underneath her feet, leaving her shaken und unstable, schwindelig, as it were.
Siegfried Kracauer, journalist, cultural critic, and leading film theorist of the first half of the twentieth century, was adamant in his rejection of the film and bemoaned Czinner’s choice of using an (allegedly) independent camera instead of having the film be narrated from Else’s interior perspective. He criticizes the alleged loss of the female voice and Czinner’s focus on developing the background story to the extent that he has. I will argue in chapter two that Kracauer focuses on the surface of the plot without
inspecting the film closely from a cinematographic point of view or—just as fruitful a way to engage with the film as an original text—letting himself be affected by it without preconceived notions of what it should be, based on its being an adaptation. As “knowing audiences” (Hutcheon 120) who are familiar with the adapted text, we need to forget our misgivings and our expectations of what an adaptation of a beloved written work needs to look like. Only then will we be able to let ourselves be moved by the film as an
independent work of fiction.
According to the Oxford English Dictionary “adaptation” refers to the “action or process of adapting one thing to fit with another, or suit specified conditions, esp. a new or changed environment.”5 Be the context biological or artistic, adaptation is always a
process of change from one object to a slightly different one, initiated by a change of environment and/or purpose. Colloquially, adaptation is understood in the context of novel-to-film, but as Linda Hutcheon has pointed out, the tradition of adapting stories from one medium or discipline to another is a longstanding one: “The Victorians had a habit of adapting just about everything—and in just about every possible direction; the stories of poems, novels, plays, operas, paintings, songs, dances, and tableaux vivants were constantly being adapted from one medium to another and then back again” (xiii). The evaluation of adaptations has moved from demanding a close rendering of the original (considering a filmic adaptation successful only when it puts the literary world on screen as close in content, dialogue, and character portrayal as possible, staying “true to the original” in a very literal sense) to a more medium-dependent emphasis on whether the relevant issues of the “original” text have been successfully transposed into the new medium with its proper tools and possibilities. Hutcheon also makes the case for the adaptation as an independent work in its own right that should not be judged at all in relation to what she calls the “adapted text.” Adapting plot lines, whole narratives, or even entire works is a creative, artistic work in its own right and should be judged as such and along the categories that are used to evaluate the respective art form.
In Kracauer’s opinion, Czinner’s crucial mistake is this: “Zudem hat Czinner alles
getan, um die Bedingungen vergessen zu machen, unter denen Fräulein Else bei
Schnitzler steht und aus denen allein ihr Handeln begreiflich wird. Er zeigt sie nicht etwa
als ein Mädchen, dem das Gemisch von Unschuld und Reflexion zuzutrauen wäre,
sondern setzt sie mitten in die sportfrohe Nachkriegswelt hinein” (Kracauer writing under
the second chapter I will try and show that Kracauer’s criticism is largely unwarranted if we read the film closely. I will examine the many in ways in which Czinner did indeed explore the conditions that explain Else’s actions, albeit giving them a slightly different edge. It may be true that Czinner’s Else does not speak of her awakening sexuality to the extent that Schnitzler’s Else does—let us not forget it is a silent film and the tools to express a character’s thoughts and states must be expressed differently than in a literary text—, but I will show that sexuality and the concomitant confusion do play a vital role in the narrative. The on-screen version experiences similar struggles and at an equivalent intensity as her literary alter ego. The cinematography engages the viewer’s senses and thus elicits the same kind of Schwindelgefühl the reader experiences when reading the novella.
Cinema6 is in and of itself a suitable medium to excite all of our senses, a
“sensation machine,” as Elizabeth Stephens calls it, “a technology for the stimulation and cultivation of all the senses” (529).7 When we enter the black box of the movie theatre we surrender to its magic. We expect to be thrilled or scared, stunned or excited, moved to tears of joy or sorrow—but moved in some fashion, in all our physicality. Surround
6 My focus will be on the experience of the moviegoer. There are numerous ways to consume film nowadays, from TVs and home-projectors to computers and smartphones. Most of these alternatives are characterized by a certain arbitrariness: videos on YouTube play off one after the other, and the choice what follows is often left to an algorithm; the videos can be paused and resumed at a later point in time or abandoned entirely. I am more interested in the experience in the theatre, with its black box, fixed start and end times, assigned seats, and where the viewer is keenly aware that he might miss a vital detail if he left his seat.
sound envelops us, visual and sound effects grab us by the guts, and the soundtrack often enough tells us exactly what to feel and how to feel it. This is largely owed to the
viewers’ training in cinematic conventions: “[E]ven our most immediate response to films is dependent on the way our senses are trained, as well as the viewing habits and the cinematic knowledge and memory that are ingrained in us” (Beugnet 2007, quoted in Stephens 2012, 531). Crosscutting can elicit goose bumps—imagine a switch from a close-up of a knife to a barely visible figure in the shade and an unsuspecting woman strolling down a quiet path.
(cultural) perceptions, not raw sensations,” Laura Marks writes in her study of intercultural cinema, embodiment, and the senses (145).
In my thesis I will look at how the two media of literature and film can both be used successfully to engage their audience’s senses in order to steer the reader’s/viewer’s interpretation of the respective text and enable a cognitive level beyond rational
comprehension: a bodily understanding. In the first chapter I will examine the ways in which Schnitzler uses the tools of the writer—language and typography—to enable a reader’s meaning-making on a visceral level: how does he influence our sensuous response in order to add to what we have perceived on an intellectual, strictly linguistic level?
CHAPTER 1:
SCHWINDELGEFÜHL, THE EMBODIED READER, AND
ARTHUR SCHNITZLER’S FRÄULEIN ELSE
Else T. is vacationing in the Italian Alps with her aunt and cousin. An express letter arrives in which her mother begs Else to ask an elderly gentleman staying at the same hotel for a large sum of money in order to keep her father out of jail for
embezzlement. The man agrees to paying the fee under the condition that he see Else naked for fifteen minutes. The better part of the text deals with Else’s reaction to the indecent proposal and her struggle with being a pawn in her parents’ hands—and in extension, those of society.
Such is the plotline of Arthur Schnitzler’s novella Fräulein Else, published in 1924 and set in the early years of the 20th century. What makes the text unique and especially suitable for an embodied reader-response approach as I will be employing is its form: Fräulein Else is an interior monologue, a self-narration of the title character
through whose eyes and ears the reader perceives the story, presenting itself as practically unmediated. The narrative is made up of various different parts: stream of consciousness passages that relate Else’s thoughts as they go through her mind consisting of
spoken quotations, with italic font if spoken by others and normal font if spoken out loud by Else herself. Em dashes often mark an exchange, a dialogue, but sometimes those dashes also mean regular breaks in the flow of Else’s stream of thought.
Interior monologue or stream of consciousness, as it is also called, is a literary technique that developed in the late nineteenth century in tandem with the rise of a deep interest in human psychology. In Vienna, this new interest in the interior and in the human experience manifested itself not only through the revolutionary concept of psychoanalysis, but also in physics, where the new positivist philosophy of science and the Viennese Circle around Ernst Mach insisted on the importance of sensory experience, interpreted through reason and logic, as the exclusive source of authoritative knowledge.8 Arthur Schnitzler, a Viennese-born and -bred Jew, was very much nurtured by this intellectual humus. Like his father, he was a physician, and like Sigmund Freud he was greatly interested in the workings of the human mind, his only scientific publication being on the topic of hypnosis and suggestion. Schnitzler can be considered Freud’s alter ego, as both were diagnosing and examining the symptoms of a repressive, neurotic society—one in his medical practice, producing seminal works of literary value in a new scientific field, the other writing plays and prose with a keen understanding of the psychology of his protagonists.9
8 For background on the intellectual milieu and philosophical as well as artistic movements of the time see Janik/Toulmin, Wittgenstein’s Vienna. Simon and Schuster, 1973. Print.
Many years prior to the writing of Fräulein Else, in 1900, Arthur Schnitzler had already successfully employed the then-new technique when creating Leutnant Gustl, an interior monologue about an arrogant and self-absorbed soldier with the royal army, who has an idiosyncratic notion of honor and an anti-Semitic and sexist fervor. This book cost Schnitzler his officer’s rank and brought him notoriety as a dissector of his class and times. As readers we find ourselves inside the mind of a narcissistic individual whose thoughts revolve solely around the satisfaction of his needs—both sexual and societal. We are repulsed by his hypocrisy, cowardly ruthlessness, and the utter superficiality of his character. Witnessing his thoughts and emotions so directly through the interior monologue, seemingly without a mediator, makes it hard to distance ourselves from him, but also to identify with him as he is such a loathsome character. We are left in a state of limbo, both glad that we can step outside of this unsavory character’s mind at the end of the novella and dismayed that he has not evolved as a character at all.
she hears, we see what she sees—or so it seems. While we do not have an outside narrator relating the details of Else’s thought process to us, hence mediating and
removing us from her, there is still the fact that we rely on her account of the unfolding of events. We as readers are dependent upon her assessment of the situation, her
interpretation of other people’s comments and actions, and her ability to read the intentions and motives of others. Keeping in mind that she is a nineteen-year-old, sheltered young woman from a bourgeois background, we have to do a lot of reading between the lines to put the picture together, sometimes reevaluating that which she might have misinterpreted.
When Else seems convinced that Cissy is jealous of her, for instance, an outsider may well judge the situation differently and see no malice behind Cissy’s words (28). Schnitzler juxtaposes Else’s thoughts, “Sie ärgert sich, daß ich so hübsch aussehe. Wie verlegen sie ist,” with Cissy complimenting her on her looks: “››Ihr Schal ist sehr hübsch, Else, zu dem schwarzen Kleid steht er Ihnen fabelhaft.‹‹”10 The reader instantly picks up on the dissonance between what Cissy says and how Else interprets it. Reading Else’s own text against the subtext she herself provides is but one of our tasks as readers. The density of the text is created through these many layers of speech that are related to us through—as we must assume—Else’s consciousness. When we read Cissy’s words the quotation marks identify them as direct speech, but as the story is self-narrated by Else
10 The page numbers I am referencing are taken from the Insel Taschenbuch edition (2002). It sets direct speech of others in italics and in chevrons (inverted guillemets). Else’s uttered speech is set in regular type within chevrons. A digitalized copy of the first edition, which was published by Zsolnay in 1924, can be accessed at
we must assume that she chooses which speech to pick up on out of the world that surrounds her. There may be words she misunderstands, there may also be parts of conversations that she does not overhear because she is preoccupied with her own thoughts.
Another, equally fruitful and enlightening task is to engage with the many sensual opportunities offered throughout the text to create meaning through embodiment. As I have laid out in the introduction, I will link an Iserian reader-response approach with a focus on how our senses and our sense memory fills in that which is omitted. In this chapter I would like to examine the many ways in which Schnitzler engages the reader’s senses—aural, visual, and haptic—through his use of that which is outside of what Else expressly relates to us, specifically sound, gaze, and touch, and combinations thereof as vehicles of knowledge, for us to complete a story that is seemingly one-dimensional, told from one single perspective, albeit an endopolyphonic one.
conducts imaginary conversations or remembers past exchanges, also make for a dizzying reading experience.
So far, scholarship on Schnitzler’s text has primarily focused on questions of gender, race (Barker 2001), and morality in their socio-historical context, examining Schnitzler’s representation of women, ascribing to him an unequalled sensitivity to the female experience (Möhrmann 1985) as well as an “explicitly pro-feminine positioning” (Szalay 2000). Else has been presented as a female performance artist (Comfort 2006, Kuttenberg) and compared with Freud’s traumatized Dora (Finney 2012) or a hysterical Elektra (Kronberger 2002). Wolfgang Hackl placed Schnitzler’s use of landscape within the context of a culture that shifted its spirituality from religion to the experience of nature (Hackl 2002), and Cathy Raymond added great insight to the ongoing discussion about the significance of music for Schnitzler and Viennese society of the fin-de-siècle by “unmasking” the “hidden meaning” that is concealed in the text.
The purpose of this chapter is to shift the focus from the writer and the narrator to the shared experience of the protagonist and the reader.11 As Karin Kukkonen writes, “every attempt to theorize interpretation models its ideal readers as it describes how meaning emerges from texts” (367). Schnitzler skillfully writes into the text the haptic, aural, and visual experiences that help the reader become one with the protagonist and make meaning of the text, to do the final work of “co-writing” it, so-to-speak. I will look at how the aforementioned senses are engaged throughout the reading of the text.
Fräulein Else lends itself perfectly to an embodied reader-response approach as the sensual experience is so clearly inscribed into the text. Else is a woman who senses the looks of others quite literally on her skin, feeling threatened or comforted by the gaze of an other, immediately reacting with her whole body and mind to the experience of gaze and touch. The text is full of evocations of dizziness and vertigo, generated by both material and sensual experiences: the air is like champagne, the mountains are of a vertigo-inducing height, hashish and barbiturates play a prominent role. Throughout the text Else plays with the thought of taking her own life by overdosing on Veronal, a barbiturate that was used as a sleeping aid at the beginning of the twentieth century with severe side effects. Apart from producing hallucinations, it was highly addictive, and involuntary overdosing was quite common. When Else first mentions Veronal she
immediately associates it with hashish and its hallucinatory properties—properties which she only knows about second hand. She displays the interest that can be expected from an adolescent when it comes to anything that is unfamiliar and possibly dangerous:
Ich werde heute Veronal nehmen. O ich werde mich nicht daran gewöhnen. Nein, lieber Fred, du mußt nicht besorgt sein. In Gedanken bin ich immer per Du mit ihm. – Versuchen sollte man alles, – auch Haschisch. Der
Marinefähnrich Brandel hat sich aus China, glaub’ ich, Haschisch
mitgebracht. Trinkt man oder raucht man Haschisch? Man soll prachtvolle Visionen haben. Brandel hat mich eingeladen mit ihm Haschisch zu trinken oder – zu rauchen – Frecher Kerl. Aber hübsch.” (13)
This calling forth of hallucinations and the constant switching of narrative perspectives within the single voice create a dizziness and often feverish pace that engender a similar Schwindel12 in the reader as Else herself is feeling. Her fundamental assumptions have
been upended, such as that her parents would protect her and not the other way round. With Garrett Stewart’s (1990) notion of the “inner articulation” or “endophony” (Stewart 1990: 7) that is involved in the process of silent reading, this switching back and forth between the first and third person with insertions of direct speech is responsible for a great deal of shared anxiety on the part of the reader. The pace of the narrative and the associative character of the (silent) speech is moving us as readers along, coercing us to sympathize also physically, feeling her tension in the fibers of our own bodies. As readers we perform the silent work of taking in the words and transforming them into images and sensations of the mind, experiencing the tensions built up through “the continual
confrontation, within writing, of the phonic and the graphic” (Stewart 1990: 24).
Aural epistemology: competing narratives and Schwindelgefühl
The most strikingly sensuous aspect of the text is its aural dimension. Music plays a pivotal role in characterizing Else as well as her struggle. As a member of the Viennese bourgeoisie of the late nineteenth, early twentieth century, Else has received a musical education and is familiar with the established repertoire. She can identify a piece by hearing it from a distance, has even learned to play that particular piece herself. As Raymond elaborated in her essay “Masked in Music: Hidden Meaning in Schnitzler’s Fräulein Else,” through the way in which Schnitzler writes Schumann’s Carnaval, op. 9, into the text he includes not only the extradiegetic readers in Else’s psychic dilemma but also the diegetic audience within the text, who unknowingly witnesses Else’s mental tumult through the storyline of the musical piece.
Schumann’s music13 and well aware of the subtext—and the context, namely the fact that Schumann had written them when he was in love with Ernestine von Fricken. The four letters referred to in the subtitle were the three note letters As (A flat), C, and H (B natural) that tie Schumann and Ernestine together—Ernestine stemmed from the city of Asch (As-C-H), but the letters also feature in SCHumAnn’s surname. Throughout the piece, Schumann writes romantic messages to Ernestine into the music, employing these notes. These romantic underpinnings of the story that is told in the music serve as an ironic and inverted counter-narrative to Else and Dorsday’s relationship.
Schnitzler’s incorporation of musical script into the great climax of the novella, when Else decides to fulfill von Dorsday’s condition and descends naked under her coat to the music room where she reveals herself to everyone present, shows the reader, even if she has not learned to read music, that the music gets frantic, the notes agitatedly moving up and down the staff, the texture getting darker from the many more notes and ties. We as readers cannot hear the music acoustically, but we see it literally on the page and if we have any musical learning our brains translate it into sound in accordance with Else’s psychological state. The audience within the text, on the other hand, is not aware of what is going on in Else’s mind, but they, in turn, experience the narrative of the piano cycle live. They hear diegetically the themes of masquerade, metamorphosis, and duality played out on numerous levels. Hence, the written text itself and the music played within the text corroborate each other’s narratives, so to speak.
The first movement included visually in the novella is No. VI, Florestan (Figure 1).
Figure 1
Adding yet another layer to the double-entendre, it is a bar which contains a motif from Papillons, an earlier piece of Schumann’s—the fluttering, flighty character of the butterfly as well as the subject of metamorphosis can all be applied to Else as well. She shifts from reasonable to dramatic, from hesitant to assertive in a matter of moments, lending the narrative a fluttering character, a speedy pace that hardly ever comes to rest, just like the butterfly, fluttering from blossom to blossom, only briefly stopping to feed. Else’s thoughts are racing, her eyes taking in the scene in the music room at breakneck speed:
Dorsday! Ich falle um. Dorsday! Dort steht er am Fenster und hört zu. Wie ist das möglich? Ich verzehre mich – ich werde verrückt – ich bin tot – und er hört einer fremden Dame Klavierspielen zu. Dort auf dem Diwan sitzen zwei Herren. Der Blonde ist erst heute angekommen. Ich hab’ ihn aus dem Wagen steigen sehen. Die Dame ist gar nicht mehr jung. Sie ist schon ein paar Tage lang hier. Ich habe nicht gewußt, daß sie so schön Klavier spielt. Sie hat es gut. Alle Menschen haben es gut … nur ich bin verdammt …Dorsday! Dorsday! Ist er das wirklich? Er sieht mich nicht. Jetzt schaut er aus wie ein anständiger Mensch. (75)
The next musical excerpt that is inserted into the flow of the text is another bar of Florestan, in tempo and rhythmic activity more closely connected with the themes elaborated in Papillons (see Raymond, 176).
But its flighty character is not the only epistemological opportunity that the butterfly metaphor offers: Else herself undergoes a metamorphosis of her own. She wraps herself in her coat much like the pupa is wrapped up in her cocoon, and once she has freed herself from the casing, her transformation is complete. All her senses are involved in the process: the music is playing in the diegetic background, telling the story of Coquette during Else’s quasi-flirtatious play with looks, trying to make herself understood through eye contact with Dorsday:
Ich will ihm nur ein Zeichen mit den Augen geben, dann werde ich den Mantel ein wenig lüften, das ist genug. Ich bin ja ein junges Mädchen. Bin ein anständiges junges Mädchen aus guter Familie. Bin ja keine Dirne … Ich will fort. Ich will Veronal nehmen und schlafen. Sie haben sich geirrt, Herr von Dorsday, ich bin keine Dirne. Adieu, adieu! (73–74)
What is positively playful and coquettish in Schumann’s musical plotline of Coquette is mirrored in the literary text, but with a feverish and desperate undertone.
Next in Schumann’s piece is Réplique, the musical reply to the flirtatious
Coquette. The movement is not referenced in the text, but if we assume that the pianist is playing the entire Carnaval cycle, this is what would be playing in the background while
Else goes on to relate what is happening. She describes Dorsday’s responding looks full of desire as piercing into her forehead, glowing eyes that threaten her:
Ha, er schaut auf. Da bin ich Herr von Dorsday. Was für Augen er macht. Seine Lippen zittern. Er bohrt seine Augen in meine Stirn. Er ahnt nicht, daß ich nackt bin unter dem Mantel. Lassen Sie mich fort, lassen Sie mich fort! Seine Augen glühen, seine Augen drohen. Was wollen Sie von mir? (74)
Schnitzler masterfully weaves the narrative of Carnaval with that of his much darker story of “romance”: While Else’s thoughts and gaze flutter back and forth between Dorsday and the “Filou” who had caught her attention earlier in the text, the (presumed) musical diegetic background is provided by movement No. IX, Papillons:
Dort im Fauteuil – Herrgott, im Fauteuil – das ist ja der Filou! Himmel, ich danke dir. Er ist wieder da, er ist wieder da. Der Römerkopf ist wieder da. Mein Bräutigam, mein Geliebter. Aber er sieht mich nicht. Er soll mich auch nicht sehen. (74)
Else imagines a possible love interest in order to make the act she is about to commit, to prostitute herself, bearable and to preserve a modicum of agency and autonomy. After all, the act of exhibiting herself is not entirely unpleasant to Else, on the contrary.
Throughout the text she plays with narcissistic and exhibitionist thoughts, displaying a sensuality that is very much repressed by the rules society has put upon her.
The subsequent movement that is being played within the narrative by the pianist is Lettres dansantes, X. Again, there are no direct references, but if we compare
Schumann’s piece, the “dancing letters” are up next in the cycle. The love letters of Schumann’s piece are juxtaposed with Else’s thoughts of the telegram that she expects Dorsday to write in exchange of her complying with his demand to see her naked:
The pleasure she experiences in this extreme situation is tremendous, and it is utterly visceral. Certainly the Veronal has a hand in her somatic response to the—so far only imaginary—exchange between her and Dorsday, but as readers we can comprehend her excitement and Schwindel, particularly on a visceral level. We have gone through a similar experience, led by the author who has rushed us along with the frantic pace of alternating voices—Else’s endopolyphony, so-to-speak— and the visual cues of increasingly busy musical notation.
Now Else’s transformation seems almost complete. The description of the sensations she feels not only on her skin but indeed under/within her skin, again, are reminiscent of the transformation of the butterfly. No one outside of the chrysalis knows what is going on within these confines. All we know is that what was before is nothing like that which then emerged. And thus Schnitzler goes on:
Die Dame spielt weiter, sie weiß nicht, was hier geschieht. Niemand weiß es. Keiner noch sieht mich. Filou, Filou! Nackt stehe ich da. Dorsday reißt die Augen auf. Jetzt endlich glaubt er es. Der Filou steht auf. Seine Augen leuchten. Du verstehst mich, schöner Jüngling. (75)
Through this process of metamorphosis, she has reached a new level of awareness, her disrobing instrumental in attaining a position of truth. Much like Eve14 who becomes aware of her nakedness at the same moment that she sheds ignorance and learns to discern good and evil, Else now sees clearly. We see this mirrored in the musical subtext
14 The similarities between Else and Eve would be a rich topic to explore but, alas, they go beyond the scope of this thesis. Still, I would like to draw attention to the first
appearance of the snake that may well have bitten Else while she dreamt on the bench at the edge of the forest: “Vor den Schlangen habe ich keine Angst. Wenn mich nur keine in den Fuß beißt. Oh weh. Was ist denn? Wo bin ich denn? Habe ich geschlafen? Ja.
as well: At the very moment in which Else drops her coat, Schnitzler inserts the following two systems of musical notation:
Figure 3
By disrobing in public she stretches the terms of Dorsday’s demand, who most certainly did not expect her to undress in front of a greater audience, but this only leads to an even clearer recognition of her solitude and exposure. No one is here to help her, only to misread her. Her great act of defiance has resulted in nothing but her realization that no one will ever see the truth, all they can see is that she will always remain powerless—a realization clearly expressed in her internal response to Paul’s comment to his mother on page 76: “››Du siehst doch, Mama, daß sie ohnmächtig ist.‹‹ – Ja, Gott sei Dank, für Euch bin ich ohnmächtig. Und ich bleibe auch ohnmächtig.”
We as readers, on the other hand, share her insight and participate in her moment of catharsis and anagnorisis. With her, we become aware of the workings of society and our own psyche and the many ways in which we are playing parts that are not entirely written by ourselves. This self-awareness, though, is the first of many steps toward knowledge and the higher realms of cognition. Like Else, the reader is invited to shed the confines of societal expectations, open her wings and set her mind free: “Ich fliege…ich träume…ich schlafe…ich träu…träu – ich flie….” (86).
The haptic gaze: seeing as touching and moving
wie im Spiegel? Ach kommen Sie doch näher, schönes Fräulein. Ich will Ihre blutroten Lippen küssen” (64). Numerous times she revels in memories of showing herself, for instance to a couple of strangers in a boat on a nearby lake when vacationing in
Gmunden—”Ich war wie berauscht” (43)—, or visualizes herself, lying naked on marble steps at the Riviera (51). It is not only the freedom that comes with disrobing and the power to stimulate someone else’s sensuality that is so intrinsically appealing to her. Divesting is also an act of stripping off guises—of costumes that we wear properly to perform the role that society has intended for us—, “revealing the truth”, as it were. “So werde ich durch die Halle gehen, und kein Mensch wird ahnen, daß unter dem Mantel nichts ist, als ich, ich selber” (67).
The kind of gaze that is of interest to me for the sake of this essay, though, is what I would like to call the “haptic gaze,” which touches and moves the one whom it hits. It is an active gaze that can make the viewed object feel caressed, but it can also be
The haptic gaze can be perceived as caressing and loving, observant and
disinterested in a Kantian sense, or it can be threatening and entangling—in any case, it is a gaze that Else feels on her skin and that we as readers experience by proxy. The
aggressive, dissecting nature of Dorsday’s gaze is emphasized by the fact that he wears a monocle. Else seems like some kind of strange creature that warrants closer inspection. Already at our first encounter with Dorsday, Schnitzler draws our attention to his gaze, albeit in a humorous, slightly disparaging manner:
››Guten Abend, Herr von Dorsday.‹‹ – ››Vom Tennis, Fräulein Else?‹‹ – ››Was für ein Scharfblick, Herr von Dorsday.‹‹ – ››Spotten Sie nicht, Else.‹‹ – Warum sagt er nicht ›Fräulein Else‹? – ›Wenn man mit dem Rakett so gut ausschaut, darf man es gewissermaßen auch als Schmuck tragen.‹‹ – Esel, darauf antworte ich gar nicht. (11, 12)
Right away, Dorsday is connected to his sharp eye, and this connection will be
maintained throughout the text. After the receipt of her mother’s letter, Else imagines the meeting with Dorsday, complaining about “die Art, wie er mich ansieht […]. Seine Augen werden sich in meinen Ausschnitt bohren” (21). The adjectives and verbs
at Else but assailing her. We imagine in our minds the monocle that acts like a
magnifying glass, inspecting our face and décolleté, touching every inch of uncovered skin.
Seeing is very closely tied in the text with recognition and reckoning – on multiple levels. First, on the purely linguistic level we can examine the lead-up to the climactic scene in the music room, the “große Vorstellung” as Else sarcastically refers to it (68). “Laß dir noch einmal in die Augen sehen, schöne Else. Was du für Riesenaugen hast, wenn man näher kommt” (67). She may be getting closer to “the truth” that she is seeking, hence her eyes are getting bigger, taking more in. Already earlier, in the lead-up to the “mirror scene” (60–67), Schnitzler closely connects the eyes with (re)cognition: “Wie schön meine blondroten Haare sind, und meine Schultern; meine Augen sind auch nicht übel. Hu, wie groß sie sind. Es wär’ schad’ um mich. Zum Veronal ist immer noch Zeit. – Aber ich muß ja hinunter. Tief hinunter” (60, 61). The bigger the eyes, the more they can take in, one is inclined to interpret.15 Tief here certainly has less a topographic than a moral connotation. Taking off her clothes before him will lead her down to the lowest strata of society, reserved for prostitutes, forced to sell their bodies in order to make ends meet and survive. It is not Else’s survival, though, that is secured by her sacrifice, but her father’s, and the disgrace for the family cannot be avoided either way. In an effort to appropriate the act, Else has decided to agree to Dorsday’s proposal, but not in his room or on a clearing in the nearby woods, as he suggested. She will show
herself naked for fifteen minutes, but she will metamorphose the demand to fit her own exhibitionist, performative and rebellious needs: by disrobing in public she attempts to exert a modicum of control and garner witnesses to her plight. It is her way of revealing the truth of her situation to everyone present—even if no one can be expected to
acknowledge her dilemma.
People will say that she is crazy, a hysteric, and for most, life may go on unchanged, but not for Else and those that she has touched immediately, namely the readers. Her transformation may engender a heightened awareness and lead to self-reflection. As readers we have embodied her trauma, have been shaken by the dizzying events, are schwindelig from the ride that is this text. We are invited to scrutinize our own conventions and question the truths that we hold. We may be grateful for having
CHAPTER II:
THE SENSES AS VEHICLES OF COGNITION IN PAUL CZINNER’S
FRÄULEIN ELSE
In this chapter I will focus on the visual, aural, and haptic dimensions of the 1929 silent film Fräulein Else, directed by Paul Czinner, with Elisabeth Bergner starring in the title role. While Czinner did not choose Else’s perspective as a first-person narrator of her tale, he skillfully combined Elisabeth Bergner’s strengths16 with an eloquent camera to convey the young woman’s turmoil and subtly express the emotional whirlwind she finds herself in. In contrast to Schnitzler’s interior monologue, Czinner’s film broadens the arc of narrated time as well as the narrative perspective(s). He begins the film with a soirée at the Thalhof residence, follows Thalhof around knocking on doors of possible financiers and shows him struggling to find a way out of the quicksand he has driven himself and his family into.
From a filmmaker’s perspective the switch from first-person to third-person narration makes sense, especially in silent film: words are only available to a certain extent to propel the story forward, and Czinner uses them—written either diegetically as letters, telegrams, signs, or newspaper headlines or as transcribed dialogue in inserts— economically and fittingly. But his medium is cinema and his narrative tools are
primarily visual, so I will focus on how he uses these to engage the viewers’ senses and elicit the emotional turmoil, the Schwindelgefühl, that is so central to Else’s experience.
The critic disagrees: why Kracauer was wrong
Some critics bemoaned the shift away from Else’s self-narration to a conventional society plot narrated by a seemingly objective camera, as well as Czinner’s choice to spend the entire first half on setting up the background story, focusing primarily on Else’s father and developing his character to a much greater extent than in the novella. This may—and did—generate a sense of dissatisfaction, anger even in the mind of an admirer of the literary predecessor, but it speaks to exactly what is at the heart of the problem that Schnitzler discusses: Else is struggling with the role assigned to her—by society in general and her parents in particular. Everything revolves around the father, and Else herself is but a cog in the wheels of a society that commodifies its women and daughters, robbing them of agency but letting them pay for the shortcomings of their patriarchs. Siegfried Kracauer wrote in a review in the Frankfurter Zeitung on April 14th, 1929: “[s]tatt die Handlung aus der Perspektive Fräulein Elses aufzubauen, hat er einen normalen Gesellschaftsfilm gedreht, in dem auch Fräulein Else vorkommt” (Gandert
189).
Kracauer’s criticism, “[d]amit verliert aber das Geschehen seinen Sinn, und es
bleibt eine ziemlich schale Verkettung von Ereignissen übrig, die eines großen Aufwands
nicht bedurft hätte,” points to a certain disappointment that stems exactly from the film
text’s character as an adaptation. Being familiar with the adapted literary text, Kracauer
work of its own, making use of its medium-specific tools. “Alles erscheint bei Schnitzler
von Fräulein Else aus gesehen: Vater, Mutter, die Freunde, das Hotel und der Mann, um
dessentwilllen sie sich vergiftet. In den Schleier ihrer einsamen Assoziationen sind die
Figuren gewirkt, vergrößern sich ihr, bringen Gefahr.“ He reproaches Czinner for
straightforwardly showing that which is only partially visible to the reader, mediated
through Else’s perception and relation. „Weder Menschen noch Gegenstände treten in der
Novelle auf, wie sie sind, sondern ragen nur stückweise in die Erzählung hinein, so
stückweise, wie sie dem Geist des Mädchens sich bieten” (ib.).
It is certainly surprising that Kracauer, a film theorist, should be so adamant in his refusal to grant the filmic adaptation an analysis with an independent and
cinema-oriented lens. If we watch Czinner’s film closely we realize that he masterfully explores exactly the circumstances that Else is struggling with: she may be the title character, but she has little agency and is reduced to being a pawn, selling herself to keep her father out of jail. Czinner’s choice to have a seemingly objective camera narrate the story from a distance instead of trying to equate the method of self-narration by cinematic means,
Kracauer complains, results in a loss of what is at the heart of the adapted text: the female
voice. As readers of Schnitzler’s novella we are placed right into the middle of Else’s
dilemma as told by herself, whereas Czinner chose to have father Thalhof’s ordeal front
and center and a supposedly objective camera narrating. I would argue, though, that by
developing the father’s role more clearly Czinner is able to add another layer of
complexity and to underscore the oedipal theme that is a latent undercurrent to
father are subtle cinematic ways of making comprehensible issues and connections that
are not expressed on a linguistic level.
When Kracauer criticizes Czinner for allegedly disregarding the conditions that
are vital for our understanding of Else’s actions, he himself overlooks the masterful way
in which the filmmaker transposed the literary text into an original cinematographic one:
“Zudem hat Czinner alles getan, um die Bedingungen vergessen zu machen, unter denen
Fräulein Else bei Schnitzler steht und aus denen allein ihr Handeln begreiflich wird. Er
zeigt sie nicht etwa als ein Mädchen, dem das Gemisch von Unschuld und Reflexion
zuzutrauen wäre, sondern setzt sie mitten in die sportfrohe Nachkriegswelt hinein” (ib.).
In this chapter I will show that Kracauer’s criticism is largely unwarranted if we read the film closely. I will examine the many ways in which Czinner did indeed explore the conditions that explain Else’s actions, albeit giving them a slightly different edge. It may be true that Czinner’s Else has little of the awakening sexuality that Schnitzler’s Else exhibits, but the on-screen version experiences the same struggles and at the same intensity as does her literary alter ego. The cinematography engages the viewer’s senses and thus elicits the same kind of Schwindelgefühl the reader experiences when reading the novella.
Schwindelgefühl as a vehicle of visceral cognition
observant, and well-educated young woman, she is caught up in her own world and cannot step outside of herself to analyze the full extent of her circumstances. But there is also another factor that may play a part: the implications of the bargain she is asked for are unspeakable, being sold off by her own parents (in the case of the novella—in the film the mother bears all responsibility) to pay for the father’s failures. Words alone necessarily fail to relate the extent of the tragedy, hence the need for additional means to describe it. The reader/viewer needs to embody Else’s dilemma in order to empathize with her. If we as viewers, like Kracauer, remain distant from the title character, the criticism may be right and Else’s reaction to Dorsday’s indecent proposal seems excessive. But if we forget about our misgivings and our expectations of what an
adaptation of a beloved text needs to look like, we may be able to let ourselves be moved by the film as an independent work of fiction.
from non-diegetic sounds, this fact is less obvious when we refer to so-called “silent” film. Silent film, of course, never was entirely silent. Since its inception at the beginning of the twentieth century, the cinematic work was accompanied by all sorts of sounds: narrators who related the background story from the stage to help the audience understand a complicated plot; pianists who by their choice of accompaniment would emphasize the content seen on screen—quick runs during a chase scene, elegiac romantic phrases while lovers embrace. For some pre-talkies, composers created scores, as did Charlie Chaplin for his film City Lights (1931). In the earliest days, music was primarily used to cover up the sounds of the projecting equipment with little regard on emphasizing the cinematic narrative through musical means, but it did not take long for directors to understand how vital a narrative tool sound can be.
Sensed sounds
scary or exciting junctures, and we have a pool of sense memories from which to draw in order to co-write the on-screen text. And sometimes quick cross-cutting, slanted angles or a revolving camera can induce a rollercoaster-ride of the senses.
In the case of Fräulein Else I will be most interested in how director Paul Czinner and his cinematographer, Karl Freund, use cinematic tools to narrate Else’s ordeal on a visceral level, a level more clearly understood by our bodies and senses and perhaps less by our reasoning faculty. Else is a young, excitable woman of a charming flightiness. She is fluttering around like a butterfly, able to do so without harm because she is safely tucked into her familial and societal structure. She adores her father and does not seem to mind her mother too much. This protective structure is damaged when her mother
connect on a haptic level, is reflected in the way the film connects with the viewer, not only on a surface level by showing us the many instances of tactile exchange in which the pleasure of the touch is being shown and addressed, but through engaging our senses and our haptic imagination, especially through eliciting Else’s Schwindelgefühl in the viewer through cinematic means—jump cuts, dissolves and superimpositions, tracking shots and close-ups, but also by the use of mise-en-scène and costume, for example smoke-filled environments or fabrics like fur or wool that engage the viewer’s sense memory immediately, or the use of doubling.
In order to show how cinematography and mise-en-scène work together to relate Else’s visceral experience and generate it in the viewer, I will focus on a small number of scenes that illustrate this point. The first two scenes I will discuss are shots of the city during Else and Alfred Thalhof’s shopping trip and the landscape on the train ride to Chur. The depictions of the city life are characterized by dissolves and superimpositions: by layering several shots of street scenes with cars and pedestrians driving and walking in numerous directions, the camera always at a different angle of the street, Czinner
achieves an utterly fluid, unsteady and dizzying portrait of city life. The viewer sees the busy street scenes and completes them with his or her own aural-experiential tool kit, adding the sounds of bustling traffic and the sense memories of busy street life: slightly bumping into passers-by, the occasional stumble on uneven cobblestone, car exhaust and honking of horns.
embezzlement.The few shots of the landscape zipping by the moving train create a certain instability, especially since they are violating the rules of contiguity editing: the landscape is not moving in one direction but also in the reverse, evoking a sense of foreboding and suggesting that this journey will not be a smooth ride. It also foreshadows Else’s later struggle, her being torn between being a good girl and following her mother’s request and asserting herself by refusing to come begging to Dorsday. In addition, the scene in the cabin is characterized by the shuttering of the actors and an unstable frame, and when Paul and Else walk along the corridor they have to hold on to both sides of the aisle, tilted, countering the impetus of the moving train.
Manifold acts of transgression
At Chur where the party needs to switch trains, a sign foreshadows the transgression that will later occur (Figure 4).
The lines that will be crossed are manifold. Else’s parents are asking her to do what no child should be asked to do by her parents: namely assume the responsibility that the father himself has failed to show and pay his debt in his stead. Dorsday will cross the line
of what is morally acceptable by asking Else to repay him with her body. And Else, finally, will cross the line by disrobing in public and committing suicide.
This sign also marks a caesura in the narrative that is told on a meta-level, hinting at Else’s feminine and sexual potential by suggesting a different kind of relationship between Paul and Else. The second train ride is quite different in atmosphere from the first. The first section of the voyage is characterized by the flat landscapes along the railroad tracks of the Westbahn. Else’s position as a child is emphasized by her meeting with Cissy Mohr. The worldly married woman is the sexually experienced counterpart to Else in relation to her cousin Paul. Paul flirts with both women, but his interactions with Else are innocent and light-hearted, whereas the sexual tension between Paul and Cissy is obvious. Cissy travels in the company of her nanny and daughter, and when Else meets the little girl she instantly swaps seats with her. Now Else has assumed the position of the little girl while the two presumed lovers are looking on.
The way Paul and Else are photographed together is also strikingly different from before: while Else had always looked much shorter and obviously younger than her cousin, the low angle of the camera now makes them appear to be of similar height, their clothing matches in color and fabric, and the way they are placed right next to each other suggests a couple, possibly on their honeymoon. We even get the classic tunnel shot17— everything goes dark and all is permitted—after which the two stand hand in hand, all excitement and joy. While there is hardly an exchange of longing looks, the fact that they don’t seem to be able to keep their hands off each other after exiting the tunnel insinuates (at least the possibility of) a romantic relationship.
Another indicator of the latent possibility of romance between Else and Paul is elaborated in the scene where Else, Paul, and Cissy go on a ride in a horse-drawn sleigh together. Cissy and Paul sit in the box seat in the front while Else sits behind them, separating the pair with the whip and reins she holds on to. We can interpret this as an act of jealousy, trying to keep the lovers apart. This is all the more poignant as it is in this very scene that Else will get access to the Veronal that will later be her means.
Else doubles for her father
There are several details that suggest Else being a double to her father: both play the piano (but while the father’s play elicits cringing and applause only out of politeness, Else’s play is beautiful and welcome—the cook tells the other staff to tone it down so she can hear, and the audience in the room sits quietly while she performs a duet with Paul on
17 Since the earliest days of cinema the darkness of the tunnel was used for sexual advances.
the violin). The father is wearing a heavy dark fur coat when knocking on the doors of possible creditors whereas Else wears a big white fur coat during her “walk of shame.” Both share a certain excitability: Thalhof needs little encouragement to invest heavily, and Else is easily persuaded to go on vacation with her cousin and aunt. There is the charming ease they display in their interactions with society, countered by the dark private moments when they consider their respective situations. And, most importantly, there are the mirrored bed scenes (see Fig. 13 and 14, p. 63): upon his return from the unsuccessful search for a loan the father breaks down and seems to have an attack of sorts. His wife helps him to his bed where he lies down. She takes care of him, handing him medicine dissolved in water to cure him. She covers him with a dark plush blanket whose texture closely resembles the white fur that will later be Else’s cover: we will see a very similar scene play out when Else is laid down in her bed, poisoned by medicine that she had dissolved in water herself and drunk on her own accord—medicine that she had been handed by Paul who wanted to take it away from Cissy. Paul will lament her loss, sitting by her side—Else having finished what her father started, namely his halfhearted attempts at suicide.
Thalhof hands to her husband to cure him will find their double in the suicidal Veronal of the subsequent scene when Paul takes the pills from Cissy to protect her, only to place them in Else’s care, providing her with the means to commit suicide.
The tactility of textures
Yet for now, Else is all excitement and joy. Her carefree demeanor is mirrored in her dress which is always appropriate for the occasion, thus giving us clues on how to read the scenes: for a walk around town to observe the Olympic sports events with Paul
she wears a sweater with a tied scarf and an a-line skirt that swings like a tutu as she imitates the ice skaters they observe together, or later in the hotel lobby where she makes carefree pirouettes, waiting for the elevator to arrive (Figure 5). Else’s penchant for pirouettes is a playful variation of the Schwindelgefühl: this turning around and around is one that gives pleasure to both her and the viewer who partakes in her gaiety (but will later give way to a whirlwind of despair).
When skijoring18 with Paul, her costume is all sensible sports clothing: a sweater and woolen pants that have no other purpose than to keep her warm and comfortable during the exercise. The fabric elicits a haptic response in the viewer, bringing to mind
18 Skijoring is a kind of winter sport where the skier is pulled by either dogs, a horse, or a motor vehicle. In the film, Else is pulled by Paul riding a horse.
the dreaded itchy woolen sweaters of childhood winters in temperate climates. The cut of the clothing is, in fact, strikingly unflattering in its roominess. In the scene shown in Figure 6 Else is reading the letter she has just received from her mother, informing her that she is the only one who can help keep her father out of jail. This scene is especially
relevant for the remainder of the story, figuring as a turning point in Else’s state of mind. From now on all light-footedness will be a thing of the past. The carefree circling about will become a dreadful spinning around her own axis, ending in her breakdown and death.
The first letter scene (at 0:51, there will be a second one at 1:17) in her room consists of just a few rather long takes, reminiscent of the Kammerspiel in its likeness to the staging in a theatre. The camera follows Else into the room and then positions itself opposite the door where the window is. Doors played a prominent role already during her father’s unsuccessful run from one creditor in spe to another, often only opening halfway before closing for good. We as viewers are on the side of the window, looking in on Else in her small and unadorned hotel room—with its clear rectangular structure it reminds us of the rigid societal corset she finds herself in. The net of parental and societal
expectations will be drawn around her ever more tightly, and the way this scene is photographed is a clear indication for her unsuccessful efforts to escape the burden that has been placed upon her. The heavy frame of the camera rests upon her and barely moves. Else is captured cinematographically inside of the frame as well as figuratively
